From its washed-out color scheme to its shaky, hand-held camera work to the mournful acoustic guitar on its soundtrack, nearly everything about Steel City is pure Indie Filmmaking 101. It’s not just stylistic, either—the story of angry young working-class man PJ (Guiry) and his severe daddy issues is boilerplate film-fest stuff, not executed nearly well enough to overcome its rickety, low-budget limitations.
Guiry is reasonably solid as an aimless twentysomething whose father (Heard) ends up in jail for vehicular manslaughter, and even if most of the dialogue consists of characters delivering overwrought speeches to each other, at least Guiry and Heard have some genuine father-son moments. Heard, a journeyman actor who’s played a lot of dads in a lot of fluff, gets to stretch some strong serious-acting muscles and show a bit of a dark side.
But writer-director Jun doesn’t give his cast much to work with, and most of the other actors come off stilted and distant, like they’re all still reading from the script at their auditions. For every sweet exchange between PJ and his refreshingly real-looking girlfriend (Ferrera), there are as many painful scenes featuring Crawford as PJ’s tortured brother, Ben, who cheats on his wife and blames everyone around him for his problems in long, loud monologues.
As PJ and Ben try to bring some stability to their lives and locate suitable substitute father figures, the movie meanders as much as they do, with dead-end subplots and characters who appear in one or two scenes to serve very little purpose. There’s a sort of narrative twist toward the end that’s a complete groaner, tipping the movie from uneven character study into ludicrous melodrama. All the same, Jun clearly has his heart in the right place, and plenty of sympathy for the tough lives of blue-collar Midwesterners. His storytelling skills and visual sense, however, could use a little work.